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Tag Archives: Parenting

How is it that five preteen boys can conjure up an odor that liquefies a person’s insides not unlike the venom of a giant Shelob-spider? Dear God, can we just firebomb the upstairs and burn out the stench of sweat and vinegar soaked rotting corpses? It’s like the room where you send spoiled Limburger cheese to suffer and die. It’s the funk of forty high school locker rooms with only an annual jock strap washing program. It’s like someone rinsed their socks in raw sewage then left their shoes on for three months after filling them with sauerkraut. It’s the kind of smell that makes rancid hippopotamus turds scream in pain and crawl away to their own treatment plant suicides. I’ve smelled drunken sports fan barf that was cleaner and sweeter than this putrid bitter madness.

The terrifying thing is that eventually my son and these boys that come to hang out will eventually be teenagers where the power of this scent will quadruple and rival that of the Incredible Hulk’s armpits in July. It will start turning people inside out after momentary exposure, and thoughts of the latrines of a Turkish prison seem a bearable option. As bad as it sounds, I welcome the day when the lure of dating drives them to shower four times a day and reach for the opposing spectrum of six gallons of Axe Body Spray. Yes, when that day comes, I hope I’ll remember this and try to imagine the alternative. Axe spray is mind-bending in its own chemical stench, but that’s almost preferred over the smell of kid’s clothing that can escape human wrath on the power of its own pheromones.

So, tomorrow’s list is pay bills, and torch the upstairs.

Baffled, sleepy and stupefied, I must now locate my bed and dream about driving that Koenigsegg CCX around the golf course again. This time while changing guitar strings. OK, I’m going now.